Punjab Govt forms group to re-train English teachers

The Punjab Government constituted a core group of experts to work out a long-term strategy to improve the language skills of English teachers in the State on Thursday. The move was taken after State Education Minister Daljeet Singh Cheema expressed "deep concern" over the abysmally low standards of English teaching skills shown by the teachers of different Government schools.

The 29-member core group will chalk out a curriculum for teachers to help them improve their language skills.The group of experts, consisting of heads of 17 District Institute of Education Training (DIET), heads of 12 Government In-Service Teachers' Training Institutes (GIST), will work out a "long term strategy" to improve the language skills of the English teachers. To take the matter further, the core group has been called for an emergent meeting on Friday at Mohali.

"The core group has been mandated with the task of studying the problem in depth, work out a crash course for the teachers, curriculum of the crash course besides working out the details of long term training programme for English teachers of such schools," said Cheema.Also, the Minister has issued instructions that he would personally monitor the training programme and would ensure that teachers would have to raise their teaching standards to tackle this problem permanently.

Cheema was in for a shock when he met about 220 English teachers, whose students have displayed poor result in the recent Class X exams by the Punjab School Education Board (PSEB), from the Government schools across all districts on Wednesday.The main intent of the meeting was to know the reasons for the students' poor performance in the English subject, besides finding out the ways to improve. Out of more than 3.78 lakh students appearing in PSEB Class X exam in 2015, more than 80,000 students have failed in English subject or had compartment.

The reasons for the dismal result in English became crystal clear after the teachers were asked to submit their reports citing reasons for the students' poor performance, and suggestions regarding further improvement which were full of grammatical errors.Their replies signified that the teachers were not capable of giving quality lessons of English to the students. Besides grammatical errors, some teacher could not spell even the common words like lack, which was spelled as "lake", vacant as "vacent", recess as ressess, among others.Expressing concern over the deteriorating academic standards in the schools, Cheema had said the teachers were more responsible for the decline than the students.